New Rules Would Ease Hiring Of Temporary Foreign Farm Help

January 27, 1985|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — The Immigration and Naturalization Service is preparing rules that would make it much easier for farmers to bring foreign workers into the United States temporarily to pick fruit and vegetables.

The rules would also discourage farmers from hiring illegal aliens. The Western Growers Association, which represents growers and shippers of fresh fruit and vegetables in California and Arizona, estimates that as many as 300,000 illegal aliens are employed in Western agriculture.

The proposals would fundamentally change the temporary foreign worker program, under which 15,000 to 20,000 aliens enter the United States legally each year to do agricultural work.

Most of them pick apples or cut sugar cane in states along the East Coast. In recent years, some have picked citrus in Arizona and vegetables in Colorado. But farmers in California and most other Western states have made little use of the program. They say the government does not approve petitions fast enough to meet their needs for workers to harvest more perishable crops, such as peaches, plums, melons and strawberries.

THE CONTENTS of the new rules were obtained from confidential government documents describing the proposals and from interviews with senior officials of the Agriculture Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Alan Nelson, the commissioner of immigration and naturalization, said the purpose of revising the rules was to make the temporary foreign worker program ``more available and usable to more growers, so they will use legal, rather than illegal, aliens.``